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If you are interested in Open Access and Open Data and haven’t hear about ContentMine yet then you are missing out! Graham Steel, ContentMine Community Manager, has written a post for us introducing this exciting new tool.

ContentMine aims to liberate 100,000,000 facts from the scientific literature.

We believe that “The Right to Read is the Right to Mine“: anyone who has lawful access to read the literature with their eyes should be able to do so with a machine.

We want to make this right a reality and enable everyone to perform research using humanity’s accumulated scientific knowledge. The extracted facts are CC0.

The ContentMine Team & Helen Turvey, Executive Director, Shuttleworth Foundation at the Panton Arms in Cambridge

Research which relies on aggregating large amounts of dynamic information to benefit society is particularly key to our work – we want to see the right information getting to the right people at the right time and work with professionals such as clinical trials specialists and conservationists. ContentMine tools, resources, services and content are fully Open and can be re-used by anybody for any legal purpose.

ContentMine is inspired by the community successes of Wikimedia, Open StreetMap, Open Knowledge, and others and encourages the growth of subcommunities which design, implement and pursue their particular aims. We are funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, a philanthropic organisation who are unafraid to re-imagine the world and fund people who’ll change it.

Jonathan Gray from Open Knowledge is on the organising committee and we are very excited to be supporting this event! Open Knowledge’s mission is to open up all essential public interest information and see it used to create insight that drives change. Open Access, Open Access to Research data and Open Education are an important part of this mission.

Applications to attend OpenCon are open until June 22nd, but applicants are encouraged to apply early. OpenCon seeks to bring together the most capable, motivated students and early career academic professionals from around the world to advance Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data—regardless of their ability to cover travel costs. In 2014, more than 80% of attendees received support. Due to this, attendance at OpenCon is by application only.

Applicants can request a full or partial travel scholarship, which will be awarded to most of those accepted. OpenCon 2015 will convene students and early career academic professionals from around the world and serve as a powerful catalyst for projects led by the next generation to advance OpenCon’s three focus areas—Open Access, Open Education, and Open Research Data. Through a program of keynotes, panel discussions, workshops, and hackathons, participants will build skills in key areas—from raising institutional awareness to coordinating national-level campaigns effectively. Apply early at www.opencon2015.org/attend.

OpenCon2015: Empowering the Next Generation to Advance Open Access, Open Education and Open Data will take place in on November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium and bring together students and early career academic professionals from across the world to learn about the issues, develop critical skills, and return home ready to catalyze action toward a more open system for sharing the world’s information — from scholarly and scientific research, to educational materials, to digital data.

Hosted by the Right to Research Coalition and SPARC, OpenCon 2015 builds on the success of the first-ever OpenCon meeting last year which convened 115 students and early career academic professionals from 39 countries in Washington, DC. More than 80% of these participants received full travel scholarships, provided by sponsorships from leading organizations, including the Max Planck Society, eLife, PLOS, and more than 20 universities.

“OpenCon 2015 will expand on a proven formula of bringing together the brightest young leaders across the Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data movements and connecting them with established leaders in each community,” said Nick Shockey, founding Director of the Right to Research Coalition. “OpenCon is equal parts conference and community. The meeting in Brussels will serve as the centerpiece of a much larger network to foster initiatives and collaboration among the next generation across OpenCon’s three issue areas.“

OpenCon 2015’s three day program will begin with two days of conference-style keynotes, panels, and interactive workshops, drawing both on the expertise of leaders in the Open Access, Open Education and Open Data movements and the experience of participants who have already led successful projects.

The third day will take advantage of the location in Brussels by providing a half-day of advocacy training followed by the opportunity for in-person meetings with relevant policy makers, ranging from the European Parliament, European Commission, embassies, and key NGOs. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of the conference’s three issue areas, stronger skills in organizing local and national projects, and connections with policymakers and prominent leaders across the three issue areas.

Speakers at OpenCon 2014 included the Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States for Legislative Affairs, the Chief Commons Officer of Sage Bionetworks, the Associate Director for Data Science for the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and more than 15 students and early career academic professionals leading successful initiatives. OpenCon 2015 will again feature leading experts. Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, two of the co-founders of PLOS, are confirmed for a joint keynote at the 2015 meeting.

“For the ‘open’ movements to succeed, we must invest in capacity building for the next generation of librarians, researchers, scholars, and educators,said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). “OpenCon is dedicated to creating and empowering a global network of young leaders across these issues, and we are eager to partner with others in the community to support and catalyze these efforts.”

OpenCon seeks to convene the most effective student and early career academic professional advocates—regardless of their ability to pay for travel costs. The majority of participants will receive full travel scholarships. Because of this, attendance is by application only, though limited sponsorship opportunities are available to guarantee a fully funded place at the conference. Applications will open on June 1, 2015.

In 2014, more than 1,700 individuals from 125 countries applied to attend the inaugural OpenCon. This year, an expanded emphasis will be placed on building the community around OpenCon and on satellite events. OpenCon satellite events are independently hosted meetings that mix content from the main conference with live presenters to localize the discussion and bring the energy of an in-person OpenCon event to a larger audience. In 2014, OpenCon satellite events reached hundreds of students and early career academic professionals in nine countries across five continents. A call for partners to host satellite events has now opened and is available at opencon2015.org.

OpenCon 2015 is organized by the Right to Research Coalition, SPARC, and a committee of student and early career researcher organizations from around the world.

Applications for OpenCon 2015 will open on June 1st. For more information about the conference and to sign up for updates, visit opencon2015.org/updates. You can follow OpenCon on Twitter at @Open_Con or using the hashtag #opencon.

France may not have any money left for its universities but it does have money for academic publishers.

While university presidents learn that their funding is to be reduced by EUR 400 million, the Ministry of Research has decided, under great secrecy, to pay EUR 172 million to the world leader in scientific publishing Elsevier .

In an exclusive piece published by the French news outlet Rue89 (Le Monde press group), Open Knowledge France members and open science evangelists Pierre-Carl Langlais and Rayna Stamboliyska released the agreement between the French Ministry and Elsevier. The post originally appeared here, in French.

The scientific publishing market is an unusual sector, those who create value are never remunerated. Instead, they often pay to see their work published. Authors do not receive any direct financial gain from their articles, and the peer review is conducted voluntarily.

This enormous amount of work is indirectly funded by public money. Writing articles and participating in peer review are part of the expected activities of researchers, expected activities that lead to further research funding from the taxpayer.

Scientific publishing is centred around several privately-held publishing houses who own the journals where scientific research is published. Every journal has an editorial review board who receive potential contributions which are then sent to volunteer scientists for peer review. It is on the basis of comments and feedback from the peer review process that a decision is made whether an article is to be published or rejected and returned to the author(s).

When the article is accepted, the authors usually sign their copyright over to the publishers to sell access to the work, or can choose to make their work available to everyone, which oftentimes involves paying a given sum. In some cases journals only receive income for the service of publishing an article which is henceforth free to the consumer, but some journals have a mixed ‘hybrid’ selection so authors pay to publish some articles and their library still pays to purchase the rest of the journal. This is called ‘double dipping’ and while publishers claim they take it into account in their journal pricing, the secrecy around publisher contracts and lack of data means it is impossible to tell where money is flowing.

Huge Profit Margins

This is important because access to these journals is rarely cheap and publishers sell access primarily to academic libraries and research laboratories. In other words, financial resources for the publication of scientific papers come from credits granted to research laboratories; access to the journals these papers are published in is purchased by these same institutions. In both cases, these purchases are subsidies by the public.

The main actors in scientific publishing generate considerable income. In fact, the sector is dominated by an oligopoly with “the big four” sharing most of the global pie:

In other words, these four major publishers resell to universities content that the institutions themselves have produced.

In this completely closed market, competition does not exist, and pre-existing agreement is the rule: subscription prices have continued to soar for thirty years, while the cost of publishing, in the era of electronic publishing, has never been lower. For example, the annual subscription to Elsevier’s journal ‘Brain Research’ costs a whopping 15,000 EUR.

The Ministry Shoulders This Policy

The agreement between France and Elsevier amounted to ca. EUR 172 million for 476 universities and hospitals.

The first payment (approximately EUR 34 million of public money) was paid in full in September 2014. In return, 476 public institutions will have access to a body of about 2,000 academic journals.

This published research was mainly financed by public funds. Therefore in the end, we will have paid to Elsevier twice: once to publish, a second time to read.

This is not a blip. The agreement between Elsevier and the government is established policy. In March 2014, Geneviève Fioraso, Minister of Higher Education and Research, elaborated upon the main foci of her political agenda to the Academy of Sciences;two of which involve privileged interactions with Elsevier. This would be the first time that negotiating the right to read for hundreds of public research institutions and universities was managed at national level.

Pre-determined Negotiations

One could argue in favour of the Ministry’s benevolence vis-à-vis public institutions to the extent it supports this vital commitment to research. Such an argument would, however, fail to highlight multiple issues. Among these, we would pinpoint the total opacity in the choice of supplier (why Elsevier in particular?) and the lack of competitive pitch between several actors (for such an amount, open public tendering is required). The major problem which prevents competition is the monopolistic hold of publishers over knowledge – no-one else has the right to sell that particular article on cancer research that a researcher in Paris requires for their work – so there is little choice but to continue paying the individual publishers under the current system. Their hold on only expires with copyright, which is 70 years from the death of the last author and therefore entirely incompatible with the timeline of scientific discovery.

Prisoners of a game with pre-set rules, the negotiators (the Couperin consortium and the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education, abbreviated as ABES) have not had much breathing space for negotiation. As aforementioned, a competitive pitch did not happen. Article 4 of the Agreement is explicit:

“Market for service provision without publication and without prior competition, negotiated with a particular tenderer for reasons connected with the protection of exclusive distribution rights.”

Therefore, a strange setup materialises for Elsevier to keep its former customers in its back pocket. The research organisations already having a contract with the publisher can only join the national license providing they accept a rise of the costs (that goes from 2.5 to 3.5%). Those without previous contract are not concerned.

How Many Agreements of the Sort?

To inflate the bill even more, Elsevier sells bundles of journals (its ‘flagship journals’):
“No title considered as a ‘flagship journal’ (as listed in Annex 5) can be withdrawn from the collection the subscribers can access” (art. 6.2). These ‘flaghip journals’ cannot all claim outstanding impact factors. Moreover, they are not equally relevant acrossdisciplines and scientific institutions.

The final price has been reduced from the estimation initially planned in February: “only” EUR 172 million instead of EUR 188 million. Yet, this discount does not seem to be a gratuitous gift from Elsevier. Numerous institutions have withdrawn from the national license: from 642 partners in February, only 476 remain in the final deal.

Needless to say, the sitation is outrageous. Yet, it is just one agreement with one among several vendors. A recent report by the French Academy of Science [http://www.academie-sciences.fr/presse/communique/rads_241014.pdf] alluded to a total of EUR 105 million annually, dedicated to acquiring access to scientific publications. This figure, however, comes out as far below the reality. Indeed, the French agreement with Elsevier grants access to publications only to some of the research institutions and universities in France; and yet in this case, the publisher already preempts EUR 33-35 million per year. The actual costs plausibly reach a total of EUR 200-300 million.

An alternative exists.

Elsewhere in Europe…

An important international movement has emerged and developed promoting and defending a free and open access to scientific publications. The overall goal is to make this content accessible and reusable to anyone.

As a matter of fact, researchers have no interest whatsoever in maintaining the current system. Copyright in scholarly publication does not requite authors and thus constitutes a fiction whose main goal is to perpetrate the publisher’s rights. Not only does this enclosure limit access to scientific publications — it also prevents the researcher from reusing their own work, as they oftenconcede their copyright when opting in to publication agreements.

The main barrier to opening up access to publications appears to stem from the government. No action is taken for research to be released from the grip of oligopolistic publishers. Assessment of publicly funded research focuses on journals referred to as “qualifying” (that is, journals mainly published by big editors). Some university departments even consider that open access publications are, by default, “not scientific”.

Several European Countries lead the way:

Germany has passed a law limiting the publishers’ exclusive rights to one year. Once the embargo has expired, the researcher is free to republish his work and allow open access to it. More details here.

Negotiations have been halted in Elsevier’s base, the Netherlands. Even though Elsevier pays most of its taxes there, the Dutch governement fully supports the demands of researchers and librarians, aiming to open up the whole corpus of Dutch scientific publications by 2020. More details here.

The most chilling potential effect of the Elsevier deal is removing, for five years, any possible collective incentive to an ambitious French open access policy. French citizens will continue to pay twice for research they cannot read. And the government will sustain a closed and archaic editorial system whose defining feature is to single-handedly limit the right to read.

Following last week’s Open Access Week blog series, we continue our celebration of community efforts in this field. Today we give the microphone to Dr. Salua Nassabay from Open Knowledge Ireland in a great account from Ireland, originally posted on the Open Knowledge Ireland blog.

In Ireland, awareness of OA has increased within the research community nationally, particularly since institutional repositories have been built in each Irish university. Advocacy programmes and funder mandates (IRCSET, SFI, HEA) have had a positive effect; but there is still some way to go before the majority of Irish researchers will automatically deposit their papers in their local OA repository.

Brief Story

In summer 2004, the Irish Research eLibrary (IReL) was launched, giving online access to a wide range of key research journals. The National Principles on Open Access Policy Statement were launched on Oct 23rd 2012 at the Digital Repository of Ireland Conference by Sean Sherlock, Minister of State, Department of Enterprise, Jobs & Innovation and Department of Education & Skills with responsibility for Research & Innovation. The policy consists of a ‘Green way’ mandate and encouragement to publish in ’Gold’ OA journals. It aligns with the European policy for Horizon 2020. OA on national level is managed by the National Steering Committee on OA Policy, see table 3.

A Committee of Irish research organisations is working in partnership to coordinate activities and to combine expertise at a national level to promote unrestricted, online access to outputs which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the State:

National Principles on Open Access Policy Statement

Definition of OA

Reaffirm: freedom of researchers; increase visibility and access; support international interoperability, link to teaching and learning, and open innovation.

Defining Research Outputs:

“include peer-reviewed publications, research data and other research artefacts which
feed the research process”.

General Principle (1): all researchers to have deposit rights for an AO repository.

Deposit: post-print/publisher version and metadata; peer-reviewed journal articles and
conference publication. Others where possible; at time of acceptance for publication; in
compliance with national metadata standards.

There are seven universities in Ireland http://www.hea.ie/en/about-hea). These Irish universities received government funding to build institutional repositories in each Irish university and to develop a federated harvesting and discovery service via a national portal. It is intended that this collaboration will be expanded to embrace all Irish research institutions in the future. OA repositories are currently available in all Irish universities and in a number of other higher education institutions and government agencies:

*DIT: Material that is to be commercialised, or which can be regarded as confidential, or the publication of which would infringe a legal commitment of the Institute and/or the author, is exempt from inclusion in the repository.

Open Access projects and initiatives. The Open Access to Irish Research Project. Associated National Initiatives

RIAN Steering Group. IUA (Irish Universities Association) Librarian’s Group (Coordinating body). RIAN is the outcome of a project to build online open access to institutional repositories in all seven Irish universities and to harvest their content to the national portal.

Repository Network Ireland is a newly formed group of Repository managers, librarians and information: http://rni.wikispaces.com

Digital Repository Ireland DRI is a trusted national repository for Ireland’s humanities and social sciences data @dri_ireland

Table 5. Open Access infrastructural support.

Challenges and ongoing developments

Ireland already has considerable expertise in developing Open Access to publicly funded research, aligned with international policies and initiatives, and is now seeking to strengthen its approach to support international developments on Open Access led by the European Commission, Science Europe and other international agencies.

The greatest challenge is the increasing pressure faced by publishers in a fast-changing environment.

Conclusions

The launch of Ireland’s national Open Access policy has put Ireland ahead of many European partners. Irish research organisations are particularly successful in the following areas of research: Information and Communication Technologies, Health and Food, Agriculture, and Biotechnology.

This post is part of our Open Access Week blog series to highlight great work in Open Access communities around the world. It is written by Celya Gruson-Daniel from Open Knowledge France and reports from “Open Access Xsprint”, a creative workshop held on October 20 in the biohackerspace La Paillasse in Paris – as announced here.

More and more information is available online about Open Access. However it’s difficult to process all this content when one is a busy PhD Student or researcher. Moreover, people already informed and convinced are often the main spectators. The question thus becomes : How to spread the world about Open Access to a large audience ? (researchers, students but also people who are not directly concerned). With the HackYourPhD community, we have been developing initiatives to invent new creative formats and to raise curiosity and/or interest about Open Access.
Open Access Week was a perfect occasion to propose workshops to experiment with those kinds of formats.

An Open Access XSprint at La Paillasse

During the Open Access Week, HackYourPhD with Sharelex design a creative workshop called the Open Access Xsprint (X standing for media). The evening was held on October 20 in the biohackerspace La Paillasse in Paris with the financial support of a Generation Open Grant (Right to Research Coalition)

The main objective was to produce appealing guidelines about the legal aspects and issues of Open Access through innovative formats such as livesketching, or comics.
HackYourPhD has been working with Sharelex on this topic for several months. Sharelex aims at providing access to the law to everyone with the use of a collaborative workshop and forum. A first content has been produced in French and was used during the Open Access XSprint.

One evening to invent creative formats about Open Access

These sessions brings together illustrators, graphic designers, students, researchers. After a short introduction to get to know each other, the group discussed about the meaning of Open Access and its definition.
First Livesketching and illustration emerged.

In a second time, two groups were composed. One group worked on the different meaning of Open Access with a focus on the Creative Commons licences.

The other group discussed about the development of the different Open Access models and their evolution (Green Open Access, 100% Gold Open Access, hybrid Journal, Diamond, Platinum). The importance of Evaluation was raised. It appears to be one of the brakes in the Open Access transition.

After an open buffet, each group presented their work. A future project was proposed. It will consist of personalizing a scientific article and inventing its different “”life””. An ingenious way to present the different Open Access Models.

Next Step: Improvisation Theatre and Open Access

To conclude the Open Access Week, another event will be organized on October 24 in a science center (Espace Pierre Gilles de Gennes) with HackYourPhD and Sharelex, and the financial support of Couperin/FOSTER.

This event aims at exploring new format to communicate about Open Access. An improvisation theatral company will participate to this event. The presentations of different speakers about Open Access will be interspersed with short improvisation. The main topic of this evening will be the stereotypes or false ideas about Open Access. Bring an entertaining and original view is a way to discuss about Open Access for a large public, and maybe a starter to help them to become curious and to continue exploring this crucial topic for researchers and all citizen.

Nature Publishing Group reported recently that in October, its Nature Communications journal will become open access only: all articles published after this date will be available for reading and re-using, free of charge (by default they will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license, allowing virtually every type of use). Nature Communications was a hybrid journal, publishing articles with the conventional, proprietary model, or as open access if the author paid a fee; but now it will be exclusively open access. The publishing group that owns Science recently also revealed an open access only journal, Science Advances – but with a default CC-NC license, which prevents commercial usages.

So we made it: the greatest bastions of traditional scientific publishing are clearly signaling support for open access. Can we pop the champagne already?

This announcement obviously has positive aspects: for example, lives can be saved in poor countries where doctors may have access to the most up-to-date scientific information – information that was previously behind a paywall, unaffordable for most of the Global South. Papers published under open access also tend to achieve more visibility, and that can benefit the research in countries like Brazil, where I live.

The overall picture, however, is more complex than it seems at first sight. In both cases, Nature and Science adopt a specific model of open access: the so-called "gold model", where publication in journals is usually subject to a fee paid by authors of approved manuscripts (the article processing charge, or APC). In this model, access to articles is thus open to readers and users, but access to the publication space is closed, in a sense, being only available to the authors who can afford the fee. In the case of Nature Communications, the APC is $5000, certainly among the highest in any journal (in 2010, the largest recorded APC was US $ 3900 – according to the abstract of this article… which I cannot read, as it is behind a paywall).

This amounts to two months of the net salary of a professor in state universities in Brazil (those in private universities would have to work even longer, as their pay is generally lower). Who is up for spending 15%+ of their annual income to publish a single article? Nature reported that it will waive the fee for researchers from a list of countries (which does not include Brazil, China, India, Pakistan and Libya, among others), and for researchers from elsewhere on a "case by case" basis – but they did not provide any further objective information about this policy. (I suspect it is better not to count on the generosity of a publisher that charges us $32 to read a single article, or $18 for a single piece of correspondence [!] from its journals.)

On the other hand, the global trend seems to be that the institutions with which researchers are affiliated (the universities where they work, or the scientific foundations that fund their research) bear part of these charges, partly because of the value these institutions attach to publishing in high-impact journals. In Brazil, for example, FAPESP (one of the largest research foundations in Latin America) provides a specific line of funding to cover these fees, and also considers them as eligible expenses for project grants and scholarships. As it happens, however, the funds available for this kind of support are limited, and in general they are not awarded automatically; in the example of FAPESP, researchers compete heavily for funding, and one of the main evaluation criteria is – as in so many situations in academic bureaucracy today – the researcher's past publication record:

Analysis criteria […]
a) Applicant's Academic Record
a.1) Quality and regularity of scientific and / or technological production. Important elements for this analysis are: list of publications in journals with selective editorial policy; books or book chapters […]

Because of this reason, the payment of APCs by institutions has a good chance of feeding the so called "cumulative advantage" feedback loop in which researchers that are already publishing in major journals get more money and more chances to publish, while the underfunded remain that way.

The advancement of open access via the gold model also involves another risk: the proliferation of predatory publishers. They are the ones that make open access publishing (with payment by authors or institutions) a business where profit is maximized through the drastic reduction of quality standards in peer review – or even the virtual elimination of any review: if you pay, you are published. The risk is that on the one hand, predatory publishing can thrive because it satisfies the productivist demands imposed on researchers (whose careers are continually judged under the light of the publish or perish motto); and on the other hand, that with the gold model the act of publishing is turned into a commodity (to be sold to researchers), marketable under high profit rates - even without the intellectual property-based monopoly that was key to the economic power mustered by traditional scientific publishing houses. In this case, the use of a logic that treats scientific articles strictly as commodities results in pollution and degradation of humankind's body of scientific knowledge, as predatory publishers are fundamentally interested in maximizing profits: the quality of articles is irrelevant, or only a secondary factor.

Naturally, I do not mean to imply that Nature has become a predatory publisher; but one should not ignore that there is a risk of a slow corruption of the review process (in order to make publishing more profitable), particularly among those publishing houses that are "serious" but do not have as much market power as Nature. And, as we mentioned, on top of that is the risk of proliferation of bogus journals, in which peer review is a mere facade. In the latter case, unfortunately this is not a hypothetical risk: the shady "business model" of predatory publishing has already been put in place in hundreds of journals.

Are there no alternatives to this commodified, market-oriented logic currently in play in scientific publishing? Will this logic (and its serious disadvantages) be always dominant, regardless if the journal is "proprietary" or open access? Well, not necessarily: even within the gold model, there are promising initiatives that do not adhere strictly to this logic – that is the case of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), an open access publishing house that charges for publication, but works as a nonprofit organization; because of that, it has no reason to eliminate quality criteria in the selection of articles in order to obtain more profits from APCs. Perhaps this helps explain the fact that PLOS has a broader and more transparent fee waiver policy for poor researchers (or poor countries) than the one offered by Nature. And finally, it is worth noting that the gold model is not the only open access model: the main alternative is the "green model", based on institutional repositories. This model involves a number of challenges regarding coordination and funding, but it also tends not to follow a strictly market-oriented logic, and to be more responsive to the interests of the academic community. The green model is hardly a substitute for the gold one (even because it is not designed to cover the costs of peer review), but it is important that we join efforts to strengthen it and avoid a situation where the gold model becomes the only way for scientists and scholars in general to release their work under open access.

(My comments here are directly related to my PhD thesis on commons and commodification, where these issues are explored in a bit more detail – especially in the Introduction and in Chapter 4, pp. 17-20 and 272-88; unfortunately, it's only available in Portuguese as of now. This post was born out of discussions in the Brazilian Open Science Working Group's mailing list; thanks to Ewout ter Haar for his help with the text.)